The most frequent cause of sterility in the male is inflammatory occlusion of the epididymis or vas deferens. It is solely to this cause and its treatment that I shall limit my discussion in the present paper.
Atrophy of the testicle very rarely occurs in epididymitis, especially in the type associated with gonorrhea. I say this from my experience in the operative treatment of gonorrheal epididymitis, as in more than 300 cases I have never found evidence of involvement of the testicle itself, the epididymis and tunica vaginalis seeming to bear the brunt of this infection.
Traumatic epididymitis rarely leads to sterility. I have recently had a patient who had an injury ten years ago, apparently not very severe, to both testes. He was examined by a doctor in another city. In the examination, eight months before I saw the patient, a needle was inserted into the epididymis, and it